In this post I wanted to shed some light on a visualization you may not be using enough: the Word Cloud. Word association exercises can often be a fun way to pass the time with friends, or it can trigger immediate action – just think of your email inbox and seeing an email from a particular person: your boss, wife, husband or child. The same can be true for information for your organization. A single word can quickly, efficiently and effectively communicate the performance of a company’s metric, hence the value of using a word cloud visualization in your report.

Let’s look at some examples. Here I am using the Insight Toy data and looking at the performance of Products based on customer orders.

As the word cloud in SAS Visual Analytics 7.3 Designer has a maximum row return of 100, I have used the Rank feature to look at the top 25 Products and the bottom 25 Products. I also created a filtered interaction between the word clouds and their respective list tables below to show a bit more detail around the next level in the hierarchy after Product Make.

Notice how impactful these Product names are compared to when using their corresponding SKUs. Be sure to pick a meaningful category to represent your data in the word cloud.

This type of visualization could lead to a great comparison report, comparing what the top and bottom Products were for the same month in the previous year.

What if your data doesn’t have the appropriate column to display on a word cloud? No problem. In this next example, I took the value of Sales Rep Rating and created a new Calculated Data Item to represent values less than or equal to 25% to be Poor, inclusively between 26% and 50% to be Average and everything else to be Above Average.

Using a word cloud for this new category data item allows you to quickly move through the different states and compare the Sales Rep Performance frequency. You could also use this new category to compare each performance group’s Order Totals.

Here is California’s Sales Rep Performance:

And here is Maryland’s Sales Rep Performance:

These are two ideas for you to think about how you might include the word cloud visualization into your reports to help quickly and effectively represent the status of a company’s metric beyond the standard text analytics usage.